The Modern Bestiary
A conversation with zoologist Joanna Bagniewska, author of The Modern Bestiary, a love letter to the wonderful weirdness of animals and one of the best nature titles of the year.
Joanna Bagniewska — The Modern Bestiary: A Curated Collection of Wondrous Wildlife (Bookshop.org / Amazon)
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the ScienceBorg Librarian.
I do believe we live in the golden age of especially nonfiction books. For example, my list of the best nature writing of 2022 already has almost three hundred notable titles!
And very high on that list features today’s guest — Joanna Bagniewska, a zoologist and a great science communicator, from Oxford University, and author of The Modern Bestiary — a wonderful compendium of incredible, but absolutely real, scientific facts about 100 superb creatures from the world around us. You will learn so many new things, on every page, from the empathy of rats to the sexual parties of our face mites.
If you‘ll enjoy these interviews, learn from them, discover great books or great people through them, please buy me a coffee and/or a chapter of a new and bloody expensive hardcover, via Buy Me a Coffee or Donorbox.
Vasile Decu: Thank you so much for this book talk and, especially, thank you for the book. It weaponized my drinking conversation to unheard of levels.
Joanna Bagniewska: Fantastic. That’s exactly what it’s meant to do.
You know, the first question usually in interviews is that cliche: why did you write the book? I think that I know what your answers might be, some of them: because you really love science and nature. You’re a maniac about creatures, small or large. And you also wanted to do your job, which is not really a job, it’s something natural, of science communication.
Yes. And in fact, you could just do this interview in your head. Well done. On a more practical term, the publisher got in touch with me and said, you know, we have this idea, would you want to help us out with it? And I thought, this is brilliant. It’s everything I wanted to do. It gives me an opportunity, exactly, to talk about something which I am absolutely passionate about, which is animals — and not just animals, but the weirdness of animals, and doing it in a very particular sciencey way, suitable for everyone. So here we are.
Believe me, I cannot do this interview on my own, because even if I take pride on knowing lots of animals, in your book I only found like half of them that I kind of heard about and even for them there are lots of new facts that are just incredible and wonderful.
Yes, that was my intention, because I wanted it to be something that would be quite inspiring for people that don’t know much about animals, but also even for zoologists to be able to find out something new. And it was good for me as well, because doing the research for the book and during the prep, I was able to find out more. Picking the creatures, that was the hardest part, because you always have to think of what sort of a story, what sort of an angle, what sort of a pretext for talking about ecology or evolution they are. And narrowing it down to just 100… is not easy.
How many complaints did you receive that you didn’t include somebody’s favourite or most interesting animal?
I didn’t get complaints, per se. I did get some disappointed looks that I didn’t include hyaenas. Which are a very good candidate. I think they’re very weird. They do a lot of strange things. So maybe in the next issue of this Bestiary, we’ll have hyaenas. But apart from that, no, I think people are very open to maybe finding a new favourite creature, based on the facts from this book. So I’m hoping that, maybe, even if they did love tigers before, they might love sea slugs now.
Exactly. And as you joke in the introduction, if somebody wants more, please buy the other 14,000 follow ups that you can do, out of so many millions of species.
Yes, this is definitely a very much an open ended sort of format, because there are millions of animals that we have described, but there are also millions and millions that we haven’t even touched upon. So it gives a lot of scope for writing more.
Photos: Masaki Hoso, Wikipedia, 2009, CC BY-SA 3.0 licence
It’s going to be a very unfair question, and I’m not going to say it like that, like ‘what’s your favourite species’, because it’s like asking me what’s my favourite book. I have many. But what were the most surprising for you? Because you had to have learnt a lot during the research.
There’s something that I found really cool, the Iwasaki’s snail-eaters. These are snakes and they eat snails. And it’s quite hard to extract the snail from a shell if you don’t have fingers. But snakes are able to do that. And the interesting thing is that snails can either have shells that spiral to the right, or they spiral to the left. Generally, the right handed snails are more common. And so the Iwasaki’s snail-eaters have adjusted to that and they have asymmetrical jaws. On the right side they have more teeth than on the left, which is really cool. So they are able to extract these snails with more precision, but only if they are right handed snails. If they encounter a left handed snail, they are like ‘ugh, I don’t have the tools for that, better leave it alone’. It’s interesting because now these snakes are exerting selection pressure on the snails. And if you’re a left handed snail, you now have a competitive advantage because you’re less likely to be eaten by a snake. So you can see this coevolution in action. And I think this is really wonderful. I was very pleased to discover that. It might not be as amazing as creatures that are able to use chloroplasts to gain food, or self-fertilise, or something like that. But these are bits I knew about already, but the snail eaters I found out and it was amazing.
Your entire book seems like an ode to evolution. To the power of evolution by natural selection, springing thousands of incredible feats that we can’t even match with our technology. It’s like a Dawkins book. I hope that’s a compliment.
Yes, and thank you. Yeah, I mean, I’m glad you mentioned natural selection, because that’s what I talked about with the snail-eaters, but also sexual selection, because we’ve got two big pressures from an evolutionary perspective — natural selection for survival and sexual selection for finding a mate and reproducing. And both of these exert pressures on species that lead them in the weirdest directions. I mean, this is why you’ve got the Guianan cock-of-the-rock that looks like this weird, orange pizza cutter with a big crest on the head. And it looks like not a bird, but some alien creature. And they do these elaborate mating displays just so the female can go ‘that one I will mate with’, for a few seconds, because that’s literally all it takes. And then off they go. So it’s very interesting to what lengths animals will go to to get laid.
The three color morphs of side-blotched lizards (Uta stansburiana). Image: Barry Sinervo
I remember the story of the side-blotched lizards, the different coloured lizards — males are coloured orange, or yellow, or blue, and they apply different mating strategies. And I like how the strategies affect the populations over years and it’s cyclical.
Yes, that’s really cool. You’ve got this weird equilibrium, very much like a rock-paper-scissors game. And, you know, in rock-paper-scissors nobody wins out of the three, but one always beats another. And so there’s an equilibrium that works very much like with the lizards.
Reading the book, I was flabbergasted (I love this word) of how much we got to know during my 40 years. The stories of animals became more and more interesting. And also how much we don’t know! There’s such a wide field of study for kids that are, through your book, getting to love nature and then having a career in studying different animals.
Yes, that’s definitely something that I’m looking forward to, seeing what the next generations discover about wildlife. But also what’s interesting is that even though we know a lot, we as humanity know a lot, and we’re discovering something pretty much every day, there are still myths that have been persistent for thousands of years, that are very much there in our everyday realities. Something that really gets me is that picture of a hedgehog that’s carrying an apple on its back. And this is so common! This hedgehog with the apple on the back… it’s everywhere, in all the children’s books and children’s stories. And you think, no, this is wrong. It dates back to the times of Pliny. It’s literally a myth that’s thousands of years old. It’s absolutely fake news, because hedgehogs don’t eat apples, they don’t hoard any food. Pliny went as far as saying that they climb trees to pick the fruit and then carry them off on the back. They don’t climb trees. So, I mean, the idea probably came about from seeing hedgehogs in orchards because they would snuffle out invertebrates to eat. But it’s amazing how long the fake news can linger. Because, of course, we know about hedgehog ecology by now, but it doesn’t quite trickle down to the children’s books and the stories in the cartoons, which is, I mean, amusing on one hand, but kind of sad on the other. We’ve got such amazing facts. Why would we need to live with made up ones instead?
Exactly, scientific reality is way more fascinating, in all the weird ways, than any Medieval bestiary. I really love the title and you really have a list there of incredible animals. They are incredible not just for readers like me, but, as you say, for scientists or zoologists and biologists. We should do that. They should do that, just pick species from another taxa, and learn about them, just out of curiosity.
This is something that we, as zoologists, don’t do enough of. Quite early on in our career, we tend to pick some sort of a taxonomic group and then specialise, specialise, specialise. We tend to stay very focussed on one subject and are completely oblivious to everything else. And in fact can be quite deprecating about other taxonomic groups. Especially a lot of my friends who are mammalogists, they go ‘ehh, invertebrates’, like ‘what’s so great about them’… After doing all that research, I can now think that there’s a million things that are awesome about invertebrates as a whole. Like dragonflies are fantastic, moths are amazing, different types of spider, ants are just wonderful! But then also even the vertebrates that are kind of less studied, you know, different species of fish that can be collaborative and have these very elaborate social systems and can sneakily figure out what it pays off to do to maintain good relationships with other fish. Or amphibians that are just so adaptable. I think it would be a good exercise for all zoologists to just have to come up with a list of 100 species, maybe not research them in that much detail, that they should be able to show the world, to say ‘look, be amazed’, because it’s a very good prompt to get them to think about the wonders of diversity.
I was talking to another great British science writer, Jim Baggott, he’s specialised on physics and astronomy and maths. But he said that when he goes into another subject, like evolution (he has a great book called Origins), he does it because he wants to satisfy his own curiosity, first of all. That he learns a lot by studying a new subject. And, also, he said that it’s wonderful that he discovered that he can get other scientists to talk to him. Everybody. Was it the same for you?
Yes. I’m very grateful for people who have given me a little bit of their time to either review chapters or talk to me about their study species. A lot of these were my friends, so they kind of, you know, felt pressured into doing that. But still, it was very kind of them to do so. But there are a lot of strangers as well that I kind of cold called. And so I would say ‘I really love your paper on whatever. Could you please tell me more’ or ‘I’m writing this book, would you mind maybe having a look at one of the chapters?’ And people would be so sweet about responding. The encounter I remember most was… about the vampire finch chapter, because it’s not a species that is very extensively studied. But I found a really good paper on their diets and the microbes inside their guts, because they’re finches that evolved from just regular finches that eat pretty much anything, from grain to flies to whatnot. But they went on to then specialise on blood. And their gut is now very much like the gut of a carnivore, because they have the bacteria that enable them to digest blood. And the person who wrote that paper was incredibly helpful. We had a nice online meeting. He’s in North America right now. And he showed me pictures of vampire finches and their interactions with other species and just went on and on talking about them. It was wonderful. And I just wish I could have a much longer chapter for the vampire finches. But, of course, I can’t. But it was really good.
“During the wet season, when food is abundant, vampire finches (Geospiza septentrionalis) will happily forage on insects, seeds or nectar. However, in the dry season, the lack of food and drinking water drives the birds to switch to more grisly sustenance: blood” Photo: Peter Wilton -CC BY 2.0
Your book, besides being like a love letter to the world around us, tells us that everything is interesting. Absolutely everything. Just look, and then look better, like the saying says. Look around you. You don’t have to go to the Galapagos, just go into your garden and you can find wonderful creatures there.
Yes. I mean, depends what sort of scale you’re looking at. But this is exactly the reason why I’ve included species that are considered maybe a little bit common and not very much liked. For instance, brown rats and pigeons, which people don’t generally tend to have a great fondness for. I wanted to show that they can do some incredible things as well. And we shouldn’t be dismissive of any species. And, of course, there are creatures that you can find absolutely everywhere, like tardigrades, they’re just teeny, tiny. So you need a microscope to really look at what it is that they’re doing. But that doesn’t make them any less amazing.
And thank you for the chapter on rats. It was so amazing, the fact that they have empathy, that because they’re social animals and this is a, let’s say, an evolutionary requirement to help each other, but still, man, I found that incredible, that they help each other, even over food.
Yeah, a rat will prefer a friend to chocolate, which is, you know, it’s a tough call, I think, helping a friend or getting some chocolate — they will actually help a friend first and then open up the chocolate prize and share it. It’s like the epitome of kindness. And I know you said that it might be a difficult question, about which species are my favourite, but I do have a huge soft spot for rats, and for rodents in general, but rats in particular. I think they’re absolutely wonderful, both from kind of a personal perspective, because I used to keep pet rats, but also as a phenomenon. They’re so adaptable and they’re so ubiquitous. You can find them anywhere. And they’ve got such an incredible relationship with humans. We use them in labs, and we fear them, and we despise them, and we like them, and we cuddle them. Or the weirdoes like me do that. And they’re a cultural symbol. I think they’re a great creature.
I’m from the countryside. I was born there, my childhood was amongst animals in the wilderness around. And I remember when my mother asked me to ‘take care’ of a family of rats that moved to our garden and I got fascinated. I started filming them, watching them, and she said that I’m useless, and now she doesn’t even ask me to get rid of a bug because I look at it and talk about it.
Oh, you’re a kinder person than I am, because we did have rats in our house and I was able to catch them, using a big box and then kind of deport them to the nearest park. So yeah, I didn’t kill them, of course, but they’re no longer here in this house, thankfully. And yeah, they’re nice. But that’s exactly the thing. If you know the species, if you know how it operates, what it does was, what it’s used to doing, and I’ve kept rats for so long that I know, I can hear like the little pitter patter and I know what the rat is moving like, and like ‘is it nervous?’ ‘is it anxious?’ ‘is it excited?’ Or what is it doing, just from hearing how they walk. And you can figure out how to catch it quite easily. And then just off you go quickly on the bike with the box and just get them out into the park.
The chapter about the panda was really funny. They’re so picky and so, let’s say, strange. And also the whole book, not just that chapter, is very, very funny. You had a blast writing it.
I did. And as my publisher said, you know, we didn’t really expect funny, we didn’t order funny, but we’re very glad that it’s there. And it turned out terrific. I remember when I first gave my very big talks, I gave a talk at TEDx Warsaw and it was like, I think, 900 people in the audience, something crazy like that. And it was in a cinema, where there was lighting on me on the stage, but the audience was completely dark, which is a very uncomfortable feeling to have, because you can’t see the reaction on people’s faces. And so I thought, hmm, how do I deal with this? Like, did they all go away? Maybe they’re so bored that they fell asleep. How do I check? And I said something funny and I heard laughter, and I was like, okay, I’ve got it figured out now. This is how I know that they’re still around. Good. And from that point onwards, I use humour very much as a tool in a lot of my lecturing, in the various talks that I give, just as a way of keeping the audience around. And so it’s kind of always lingering at the back. And also because I live in the UK and in this country there is an undercurrent of humour everywhere. Even if you go to a funeral and there’s a eulogy being spoken, people expect like a little funny snippet every once in a while. It’s a very cultural thing because it’s not necessarily the same in other parts of the world. I remember giving a talk in the UK where I knew that I put in some funny parts and people did laugh and I took it to Poland and people were quite confused because they came to hear a scientific talk and not a comedy show. You know, they’re like ‘did she just say that’, like ‘are we allowed to laugh?’ So I find it’s a good tool to engage with people. I tried to… I wouldn’t market it as the funny book, because that, of course, gets people to expect, I don’t know what, fireworks, but I try to keep it quite light-hearted.
Oh, you do have fireworks, because I remember laughing and it was 2 a.m. and I was reading the book in the kitchen…
Yes!
Several times and it was natural. Your book is also a love letter to language. Besides the scientific language, like the Latin names (I used to… even in Eastern Europe, we had a strange school curricula and we had Latin for example, we learned how to swear in Latin and stuff). Now it’s useful because I don’t have problems with scientific names. But also there are words like myrmecology, myrmecomorphy… I hope I’m saying them right.
Yeah, excellent.
Semelparity, dermaytotrophy… A lot of great words. I think you moved to Oxford to run away from the translators, because of the names, the scientific names, but because of the puns, great puns. Should I have to translate it… It’s hard.
Yeah. I don’t envy the translators. We’ve got a Polish version coming up, which I’m not translating, somebody else is. But I do have a say on how the final version will look, which is good, but there’s also a Korean version. I have no clue how they’re doing, the translation there. I have no influence over it. But I think the things that are difficult to translate are not the Latin based words, but the various puns that I go for, because I do that a lot, and some of these will have to be completely replaced in a different language. So we’ll see. We’ll see how that comes along. But, yeah, I did have a classicist friend on hand who would help me with the Latin and Greek names. He was very kind to do that. He kind of was looking forward to the next weird thing that I would throw his way. I don’t know if he was learning how to swear in Latin, but they teach him how to say long penis snail or something like that. Yeah, he did have a little fun with it.
Almost from every page, you can go in a rabbit hole of new information. You can stop the book and then go on Google, YouTube, and just find pictures and new facts. You’re a great starting point. The Modern Bestiary just hooks you, it’s a gateway drug to learning a lot about animals.
Well, I’m very glad to hear that, because that was very much my intention. And I would not dare to write an exhaustive book on 100 species, because it would be a humongous thing. But at the same time, just to give people a hint and leave them craving more is very much what I attempted to do.
There are so many factoids, and some of them scary, like the fact that, like the Liverpool anthem says, you never walk alone, you have a lot of face mites that are having sex, orgies on your face, and it makes me say ‘ick’, and then it also makes me say ‘can I have a microscope?’
I have not observed my own face mites under the microscope. But maybe one day I’ll see that. I’m sure that all of us have them. You might as well live with them. Although my husband read the chapter and said ‘No, I don’t have them, I don’t have any, I just don’t have any. You might have some. I don’t.’ In complete denial. For me, the scary bits were not even the ones related to us, but the ones of what different creatures do to each other. I think the bit that is most disturbing is the parasitoids, which lay eggs in a live animal and then, as the eggs hatch, they eat the animal from inside. So you’ve got parasitoid wasps that do that with caterpillars. Or other wasps that are able to completely brainwash cockroaches to use them as a living larder for their food. They stupefy this cockroach in a way that it becomes docile and very slow and unable to move. And they do this like a brain surgery, almost like Nurse Ratched, that just leaves them still alive, but not in a fit state to do anything. And they lay eggs inside and that’s it for the cockroach. So, yeah, to me, that was the weirdest, most disturbing aspect, I think.
They say that sex sells. This should be a bestseller because sex in the natural world is wild.
Yes, and it comes in all sorts of forms. I don’t know when they say that sex sells do they really mean, you know, the penis fencing of the flatworms, or do they mean the traumatic insemination of the bedbugs, or all sorts of other weird aspects. But there’s definitely all versions of sex and not just the copulation, but also creatures changing sex, there are hermaphrodites, one animal was male and then becomes female, or the other way around, or unisexual species where it’s females only. There is so much variety and something I allude to in the introduction: if you’re trying to prove a point that relates to humans using the animal world, you better be very careful, because pretty much anything you say can be refuted with another statement from the animal world. So it’s going to come back and bite you. And if you say ‘Oh, this is not natural’. Well, if I’m going by natural, then have you eaten your own mother? Because that sometimes is natural or, you know, stuff like that. ‘Natural’ can be pretty upsetting.
I know that for a long time biologists were wary of anthropomorphising or using that mechanism for animals. I was talking to Hannah Mumby, she’s specialised in elephants, and she said that okay, this is the scientific doctrine or rule, of not doing this, but of course we can talk about friendship between different males. But to a point. As you say, I also want to scream often ‘stop using the natural world for telling tales about humans’.
Yeah. So it’s like the opposite of anthropomorphising the animals. It’s animalising humans. And I’m very careful, when people ask me ‘oh, are humans naturally monogamous?’ I don’t know. I’m not an anthropologist. Don’t ask me. I can tell you about bonobos or other species. But humans are a whole different ballgame. And it’s very difficult to argue that something is natural or not natural. And Hannah does raise a valid point that we generally try not to anthropomorphise especially the animals we work with, but we’re only humans and we do get attached to the animals that we interact with. And so it’s very difficult sometimes to put our own impressions and feelings to one side and kind of be purely objective when making observations. There are, of course, scientific techniques to help that. But it’s not easy.
The another great thing about your book — and I really love it, I’m not just saying it because you’re the first guest to the ScienceBorg Librarian book talk podcast and YouTube channel. I’m saying it because it really is one of the best books of the year. And we have hundreds of new nature titles every year. Your book is meant to be kept in the library and opened and reopened and read again or just a few pages. Did you mean that, or is just a happy accident? It will be evergreen or long-green for many years.
I don’t know how evergreen it will be. As more research is done, more facts are given, and probably it will become obsolete when we get to find out more and more things about different species. But I’m hoping that the basic biology of a lot of them is not going to be that different, you know, ten years from now. It is very kind of you to say that it is going to be put in the library and people are going to go back to it in and out. I think of it as a book that you put in the toilet and you read a chapter every time you go in. Because the chapters are short and they’re quick as well. It’s the perfect place. And, also, you don’t have to follow a precise plot line. My publishers would be horrified if they heard me say that. This is meant to be a beautiful coffee table book, how can you even suggest that it’s a toilet book? But I think it’s really useful for that.
Thank you so much for this sound bite, because I was saying the same thing. And one of the authors that I interviewed just looked kind of funny at me, but I really meant it as a compliment, because you read it and reread it. That’s a good place to be, sometimes, in the toilet, as a book.
Yeah. I find it useful to have either a book that has a plot so gripping that you can’t put it down and then just read it in one sitting. Or one that you can come back to, read a little bit, and then go do something else, and then come back to it. And you still have an idea of what’s going on or the chapters are so short that you move on to the next one. Because if it’s something in the middle, sometimes you put the book back, you don’t come back after a while and you feel like you need to reread everything from the beginning to remind yourself of what it is that has just happened. It’s nice if you have the time to read in a leisurely way, but if you’re kind of busy and do reading on the train or on the bus, then it can get a little bit difficult.
Ed Yong — An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (Bookshop.org / Amazon)
Lee Dugatkin — Power in the Wild: The Subtle and Not-So-Subtle Ways Animals Strive for Control Over Others (Bookshop.org / Amazon)
Lucy Cooke — Bitch: On the Female of the Species (Bookshop.org / Amazon)
I will put your book on the shelf with this year’s Ed Yong’s An Immense World, which is…
Oh, that’s such a compliment. I love Ed Yong’s work!
He has a talent for making you curious. And you do the same.
Then also next to Lee Dugatkin’s Power in the Wild and Bitch, by Lucy Cooke.
This is a book that gave me such an impostor syndrome! My book was published and then a friend lent me the book Bitch and I was like ‘Oh, this is… It’s incredible. It’s funny, it’s witty, it’s really smart. And it’s really important. I love it.
Can I steal from you other title suggestions?
Yes. My recent favourite is Elegy for a River, by Tom Moorhouse, who’s actually a friend of mine. But that’s not why I’m recommending it. Because a lot of friends wrote books that I maybe won’t recommend straight away. But this one is fantastic. It’s there for anyone who is interested in conservation from the very practical side of it. Tom is a biologist and he describes how he was doing his doctorate and then different post-doc projects and more independent research on all things river related. He mainly focussed on water voles, which require conservation in the UK, and then on invasive American signal crayfish which are on the other side of the spectrum — so they’re very much a threat to the local white crayfish. And this is a book about all the things that go wrong during the field work. It’s a book about hope that you have, why you do things, why is it that you want to venture out at 5:00 o’clock in the morning in a really cold, wet day, in the river, and sleep in a tent when it’s freezing, and eat terrible food. What do you have in the back of your head to keep you going? And what is the connection to nature? It’s very funny, but also very emotional and a very sweet book. I really, really recommend it. And it’s one of those books that you kind of sit down and read in one sitting.
Thank you so much! Both for the recommendations; for your book; and for this lovely talk and the fact that you gave me some of your time.
If you enjoyed this interview, please buy me a coffee and/or a chapter of a new and bloody expensive hardcover, via Buy Me a Coffee or Donorbox.
